The Current Study
Previous studies have established that children with LLI are less likely than their peers to show integration of auditory and visual speech cues under illusory circumstances. The aim of the current study was to establish if children with LLI are able to benefit from visual speech cues during a nonillusory paradigm, which is therefore more representative of naturally occurring conditions. Children completed a silent speechreading task and an adaptive test of speech perception in noise with and without visual support. It was hypothesized that children with LLI would show a developmental lag on both speech perception tasks. As previous work suggests that children with LLI are less likely than TD children to integrate speech cues across modalities, it was further hypothesized that for the speech-in-noise task children with LLI would benefit less from visual cues than their TD peers and that this benefit would be related to speechreading ability as has been previously found